Will I love The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories?

This book is the ultimate spiritual rite of passage. It begins with a metaphor—a lone leopard dead on the summit of the mountain. I felt the pain and chaos of Hemingway’s protagonist, Harry, deeply dying of gangrene on the plains, never to find enlightened consciousness on the clean white mountain canvas high above.

Good things happen in the mountains; bad things happen on the plains. This story sparked my climb of Kilimanjaro, my vision quest in the Cartwheels Quadrilogy.

Hemingway understood that small things, seemingly insignificant events or (in the case of this story) a burned-out bearing can cause—in the true wild—consequences taking the characters into realms of danger and adventure they never sought nor could anticipate. Hemingway relies on the inner strength of his characters, facing the very reality they find themselves in, to bring dignity and hope to what could otherwise be a tragedy.